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Richard Stallman: Cell Phones Are 'Stalin's Dream'
jbrodkin writes "Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream,' says free software pioneer Richard Stallman, who refuses to own one. 'Cell phones are tools of Big Brother. I'm not going to carry a tracking device that records where I go all the time, and I'm not going to carry a surveillance device that can be turned on to eavesdrop.' Even the open source Android is dangerous because devices ship with proprietary executables, Stallman says in a wide-ranging interview on the state of the free software movement. Despite some progress, Stallman is still dismayed by 'The existence and use of non-free software [which] is a social problem. It's an evil. And our aim is a world without that problem.'"
Oh come on, trying to get everyone to stop using mobile phones is a little bit far fetched. It's also not like you can make the cell phone technology in any other way, location tracking will always be possible. That's why there are laws that restrict access to such records. AND if you really want to blow up a pizza place, leave your phone home that one time.
And the social problem of non-free software? People do not care. They never have, they never will. I doubt Stallman cares about every little detail about things he uses but isn't that interested in. When he is cooking his tv dinner, he just wants a microwave that works. When Stallman goes to his weekly pony riding classes, he just wants a pony that works without going into every mundane detail. Some little girl could think that Stallman is evil because he doesn't raise, feed and have the pony at his home as part of the family, but while Stallman doesn't have time to raise a pony, he wants to ride one. That's when you take what's easy for you without going in to details.
harbinger.
RMS is seen as crying wolf, but many of his weirdest predictions have come true.
Viz. The Right to Read
And we're already there with Amazon's action's regarding remote Kindle book manipulation.
Cell phones? Remember the article on government snooping while the phone's turned off? The fact that cell phones can and do track you is blindingly true, but for some reason, people don't even want to hear it.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Some of us who do software development have families to feed. All software can't be free. Not all developers can be paid to do open source development and research at MIT. I support open source, but open source isn't the savior of humanity to bring world peace. Free software is like some FSM for RMS. He practically worships it.
the 'turned on to eavesdrop" is very real.
http://www.zdnet.com/news/fbi-taps-cell-phone-mic-as-eavesdropping-tool/150467
"functioned whether the phone was powered on or off." "a cellular telephone can be turned into a microphone and transmitter for the purpose of listening to conversations in the vicinity of the phone."
"remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner's knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call."
That was a few years about past cases.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I own and operate a fairly famous restaurant, and see a lot of people every week. Just this past week on Friday evening an older guy and I began chatting about Big Brother and the eaves dropping nanny state we live in. He told me that one of his friends and him would talk about "things" down in his workshop on his property, but that he made anyone that came there take the batteries *out* of their cell phones, because they can record and transmit conversations even when you think they are off. He said we learned this little intelligence hack from the Chinese who have been doing it for a few years now. I have no idea, but have manually disabled the GPS tracking feature in the phone, however any picture I take with the phone still has the lat/lon data in the photo. I don't want the latitude and longitude dammit!
More than a few times I have told my wife that I wanted to throw our phones in the fireplace, but she is the trusting type, and doesn't seem to believe me when I tell her how her phone can violate hers and our privacy. I honestly hate cell phones on so many levels, but they are still one notch below my hatred of Facebook. To me the two go hand in hand. It is so easy to post things that may seem innocent on Facebook, but they end up being used against us. Facebook is number one in the privacy violation department, and we do it to ourselves. That is why both my wife and I have deleted our Facebook accounts and thankfully moved on over the last month and a half. I never liked Facebook anyway, but was on there to try to protect her. There is something gossipy and just plan creepy about it. Hell, i had customers who weren't even my friends on facebook coming in and asking me about posts i had made because they had been gossiping i guess with some of my Facebook friends in real life. JUST WIERD! My wife had her co-workers on there and supervisors on there. It was a recipe for disaster, and it almost ruined our marriage, and it definately creeped us out really good. Anyway, hopefully for my wife and I our cellphones will be the next to go... We aren't being luddites, but rather trying to retain at least a semblance of privacy in a nosy, gossipy, and evil networked world...
The FBI could have planted bugs in my apartment. They could bug my landline telephone. They could point a laser device at my window and pick up voice via the vibrations. They could be following me. They could have planted a tracking device on my car.
Am I worried about this? No. Because there is no reason for the FBI to have any interest in me, and I'm not paranoid. It's certainly within the bounds of possibility, but then so is dying today by being struck by lightening. It's nothing to worry about and certainly not anything to inconvenience myself over by hiding in a cave.
RMS has mental issues.
You know, he may be a fanatic, but he is quite realistic with the "tracking" part. If you understand german, check out this animation (you can still watch the animation if you don't understand german and get the overall idea though).
Basically, some politicians asked for the 6 months of basic data about his phone useage ( which towers he was near to, with whom, when and for how long he was on the phone) mobile phone providers are required to keep in germany, and journalists at Die Zeit combined those with publicly available updates from his twitter and FB account and his party's website to reconstruct where he was and what he was doing in those 6 months.
They were not only able to track him, but also to build quite a detailled profile of his everyday life and personality that way
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow
Affordable motorcars are Hitlers dream. What's his point?
The FBI could have planted bugs in my apartment. They could bug my landline telephone. They could point a laser device at my window and pick up voice via the vibrations. They could be following me. They could have planted a tracking device on my car.
All of those except the landline require actions in the physical world, where resources are limited and distances are real. Those natural limitations will prevent large-scale invisible abuse. You can do it on a limited scale, or you can do it big scale but then the country turns visibly into a police state.
Bugging your landline or your phone, or reading your GPS coordinates remotely requires a computer and being the FBI so you can tell the telco to go and do it. Running it on 1000 people is only marginally more troublesome than running it on 100 people. And that's a very important difference.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
No. Because there is no reason for the FBI to have any interest in me
You are probably less relevant than RMS. But there are many powerful interests which would have interest in tracking and eavesdropping on him, so his argument is sound.
But your point of view leads to the more worrying conclusion that, because most people lack the talent or the courage to take a stand, it shouldn't matter that those who do make a difference may be prevented from doing so. Essentially, you're scared of freedom and you resent those who want to enjoy it.
Anyway, as a matter of routine I take out my cellphone battery when I don't need to use it. It probably cumulatively wastes an hour a year of quick hand movement, which is less than I waste in a couple of weeks on.. err.. masturbating? I know I'm less relevant than RMS, but being the activist type (in the sense of organisation and publication) I'm probably slightly more interesting than the average lady or gent. I know for certain by questions I've been asked at US immigration that at least someone's paying attention to what I'm doing.
You have the right to be boring. I shall celebrate my freedom not to be.
It's more than feasible to do on everyone, in fact the latest "straight out of 1984" directive from EU demand they store positions on all phone communication - which for smart phones is roughly 100% of the time - for 6-24 months.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I read a book on computer security, and it mentioned that somethings only become sensitive when aggregated. I couldn't really grok a good example until I started seeing stuff like this. When people use Twitter and FB and whatnot, they don't consider the information they put out there as being "sensitive" or private. However, that doesn't mean it doesn't become so when aggregated. These people signed up for it, I know, but I think the vast majority of social media users out there don't quite understand just how scary the information about them becomes when it is all aggregated together.
He just needs to stop communicating it this way. He's starting to ratchet up the rhetoric to the point where the fight against non-free software resembles a cosmic war.
This is not a good vs. evil zero-sum game, Mr. Stallman. Eliminationist rhetoric has no place in our society.
When we are in the work camps and the non-geeks ask us why we didn't warn them, we will respond "Erm, there was this one guy called Stallman who kept trying to warn us, but we wouldn't listen". Stallman will become a legend, maybe even Skylab's Terminators will talk about him once they have destroyed Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
But Stalin would also have loved computers. They are the perfect tool of big brother. I mean really folks here is a news flash for everybody. Technology can be used for good or for evil.
Jet aircraft can fly people to hospitals where they can get treatment or carry bombs.
The printing press can be used for the Bible, Penthouse, Mien Kampf, and text books. I will let you all argue over which is and is not evil.
And a cell phone can be used to call for help when you car is stranded or if you are hurt.
And the internet can be used to view websites like Godhatesfags, slashdot, whitehouse.gov and REI.com. Again you can pick which of those is evil and which is good.
Welcome to the real world. Many things can be used for good and evil. That is just the way of the universe.
Oh and China is pushing Linux!
EVIL!!!!!!!
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Indeed! Most programming languages are actually pretty easy, and I think most people wouldn't have much trouble learning the basics (it's just basic logic if/then, loops etc.), but the platforms are so monstrously complicated that it requires a massive time investment to get anything that does anything, that it's just not worth people's time.
Like most not-really-a-programmer types, I've learned the a portions of the web stack (SQL, PHP, Javascript), and I feel pretty comfortable reading other languages such as Python, Ruby, Java, or C--they just aren't that different. But learning how to get from lines of Objective-C, say, to a functional Application? Oh man, that'll take me weeks.
a lot of you in other countries havent gone through this, but in turkey, everyone knows that they are being listened. the government refuses that they are listening to everyone's cell phones, however, always anything that is detrimental to the interests of the current government 'leaks' to pro-government newspapers from unknown sources. ironically, neither police or secret service unable to 'find' who does this. it keeps on going and going. even the judges' phones are being wiretapped, without authority. some judges started to buy jammers. despite ALL of these are in mainstream media, and everyone discusses, situation still hasnt changed. wiretapping goes on, noone is able to 'find' who is doing it. even ordinary people started to pay attention to what they are telling over the phone to each other. it was officially stated that over 60,000 people were being wiretapped at a given moment, but, naturally these are only those who went through 'due process'. everyone knows much more is being covered.
it is probably happening in usa, u.k. etc too. but, the difference is, the governments there are not so clumsy as to go on using everything they find out by leaking it to their supporter media. they are probably using those much more wisely. how do i know ? well, the entire listening equipment and infrastructure here in turkey was bought and installed by american corporations.
Read radical news here
Ahh, yes. Like his fanatical rant about the evils of DRM in books, and how it could be used to control what we were allowed to read, right? glad that one never happened.
It'd be a lot easier to dismiss RMS as a "nut" if he wasn't right so damn often.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Well, I can't speak for anyone else, but getting totally fucked over by allowing myself to become dependent on orphanware, is how I became an "OSS geek." Proprietary executables have serious practical real-world disadvantages.
Free software isn't a religion; it's a rational strategic reaction. My Amiga went years without an OS update. OS/2 too. My current work machine can't run a lot of software because it has an obsolete version of Mac OS X and there is no upgrade for this hardware.
The proprietary compilers for the proprietary language that my former employer used (Clipper and Visual Objects) sucked and weren't getting maintained, and there wasn't anything to do about it except throw away thousands of lines of code that our products depended on. (Our solution was: go out of business. Problem solved.)
Then I look at all the computers I now own, and am grateful that every single one of them can and does get maintenance, because they run Free Software. The only way these computers will ever become obsolete, will be if I decide they're too old/slow/powerhungry. (It's surprisingly how many peoples' computers become obsolete for reasons other than those things.) The only weakness is that some of them have Nvidia hardware and I run the proprietary drivers, so some day I will upgrade a kernel, and the driver will no longer exist because Nvidia will decide, "fuck you, user." Fortunately, this day hasn't come yet for those machines -- and it won't come for any of my newer hardware, ever. (Why? Because I preemptively prevented it, by thinking about it before stupidly buying things which require proprietary drivers.)
If you use proprietary software, you get fucked, and that is the common case, not the rare case. It happens to most users at one time or another. Some of them realize what caused their problems and become "OSS geeks," and some of them don't get it, and repeat the mistake again and again and again, never ever learning how they set themselves up to become dependent on third parties.